Conservative: only glow map parts of textures that are clearly light emitters. For example: the dots on your above texture. Only hard core purists would have a problem with that, and depending on how hard core they are, they can disable bloom, or they aren't going to use your textures anyway.

That texture looks good. Reminds me a little of the ones Visciom did for the water set--you could save yourself a little work by getting permission to re-use his, which should be no problem.

There are places in the original textures clearly meant to be used as light sources, like the white circles in your example treellama pointed out. These are instances where I think Bungie would've made them glow, given the chance. I would prefer those areas to glow in a replacement texture.

All the replacement textures I've seen for original Bungie textures attempt to simulate glow and bump effects by coloring the diffuse map itself. In other words they were made without glow and bump maps in mind, so they just fake it. Now would be a good time to make a batch where the illusion of bump comes solely from the bump map, and the illusion of glow comes solely from the glow map. Put differently, these textures would only look like the originals when using all three (diffuse, bump, glow) at once; the diffuse by itself would look flat and unlit.

Crater Creator wrote:All the replacement textures I've seen for original Bungie textures attempt to simulate glow and bump effects by coloring the diffuse map itself. In other words they were made without glow and bump maps in mind, so they just fake it. Now would be a good time to make a batch where the illusion of bump comes solely from the bump map, and the illusion of glow comes solely from the glow map. Put differently, these textures would only look like the originals when using all three (diffuse, bump, glow) at once; the diffuse by itself would look flat and unlit.

I have a suspicion that modern game engines have far more sophisticated renderers, which allow them to do what you described. Have you tried bumpmaps in A1 enough to make you confident in your suggestion? In my own experience, a plain texture + bump map will not look satisfactionary good.

G.S.10 wrote:I have a suspicion that modern game engines have far more sophisticated renderers, which allow them to do what you described. Have you tried bumpmaps in A1 enough to make you confident in your suggestion? In my own experience, a plain texture + bump map will not look satisfactionary good.

No, I haven't. What I mean to say is, existing replacement textures like the TTEP were made at a time when the diffuse map was WYSIWYG. Texture artists should keep in mind that's no longer the case. That means not being afraid of making a diffuse map that doesn't look right without the bump, alpha, and glow maps adding to the final result.

Crater Creator wrote:No, I haven't. What I mean to say is, existing replacement textures like the TTEP were made at a time when the diffuse map was WYSIWYG. Texture artists should keep in mind that's no longer the case. That means not being afraid of making a diffuse map that doesn't look right without the bump, alpha, and glow maps adding to the final result.

If I had a more powerful computer I might be more sympathetic to your cause.

Take a second look, and then look at the original texture. Its alignment is 180° off on the x-axis. If you use this with a wall that was textured using original textures, it would be misaligned. If you use this to texture, and someone using original textures is playing your map, it would be misaligned. I only noticed because I became curious enough to compare software rendering and shader rendering using your texture replacements. They're very authentic! But unfortunately this is an issue.

I was able to install the water plugin just by putting the zip file in my plugins directory. The lava plugin was a zip-in-a-zip so it took an extra step to install. I like the first way better.

The water plugin has tasteful glow maps enabled for the light emitting textures, but it doesn't seem like the lava plugin does--just the lava texture itself. Is this correct?

Water 29 has a few white rectangles on it, that though they are present in the original texture, keep making me think they're texture artifacts. Maybe they would be more convincing if they were subtle/stopped at the circular bevel on the texture

I will probably make DXTC versions of these for my old PowerBook, which doesn't have very much VRAM. Would you like me to upload them?